


Hinges and Handles

by stillmadaboutpetra



Series: raunchy bakery au [2]
Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell, Simon Snow & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bakery, Campy, Come Swallowing, Communication, Domestic Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch/Simon Snow, Eating, Established Relationship, Food, Love Confessions, M/M, Past Abuse, Past Drug Use, Protective Simon Snow, Simon Snow Loves Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch, Spit and sundry, Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch Loves Simon Snow, baz: i have trauma, eating issues, horribly graphic chicken preparation, i think this still qualifies as camp, non explicit but potentially eating disorder content, raunchy, simon: yeah u and me both buddy it be like that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-14 10:34:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29044701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillmadaboutpetra/pseuds/stillmadaboutpetra
Summary: A few quick notes for you catch up with me since you last dipped into my mind; what possessed you for more of this, I don't want to know.-Since getting back together, Snow and I have been enthusiastically joined at the hip for over four months.-Sunday is date night.-I'm in the rising curve of wedding season and a bit cantankerous.-He's trying to win over Fiona.-Bunce and I are in a perpetual stalemate.-Everyone knows I'm deranged.-And I'm more than completely in love with Simon Snow.It's all a bit much for my sensitive humors.
Relationships: Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch/Simon Snow
Series: raunchy bakery au [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2131689
Comments: 67
Kudos: 131





	1. Unhinged

**Author's Note:**

> back by popular demand except a bit different. #1 thing people wanted to see was fiona showing simon how much baz crushed on him from GBBO except itis not really about that. im also tackling the whole Lamb issue that I hopefully laid the groundwork for so it shouldnt really be out of left field. this is all content that like, i edited out of a pints a pound so that that story was more tonally cohesive and this is the scrambled leftovers.  
> ch2 has a tw note for yall
> 
> much much much gratitude to Seelieunseelie for patting my head and doing a beta check on the first monstrous half of this <3

Simon Snow is fistfucking a chicken.

The carcass of a chicken, rather, if that makes it less traumatic to visualize. Or perhaps it being a cold raw roasting chicken sweetens the deal for you. Whatever you're into. As a vegetarian, I can’t relate, but I’m sure you can find someone to validate your niche interest.

Despite my own vivid imagination and degenerate fetishes, even the gasping sloshing sounds of his hand punching in and out of the cavity can't repair the scene. The alien paleness of its slick skin and the flat smell of the plastic and blood in the sink does me in for a bad time. I've kept my eyes firmly fixed on Snow’s freckled face, but queasiness quivers me to a frail state.

Disgust has always been an emotion I readily express. I make no attempt to stifle the fervor of distaste in my voice, hoping it hides the faintness parallelling it. “I think it's clean now, Snow.”

He looks seconds away from breaking out soap and a sponge and then I really might go white-eyed and foaming. I should applaud his commitment to cleanliness, but I'd rather everyone get a food borne illness and die brutally before me than bear this a moment longer. Fortunately, he's wise enough to agree with my assessment and sense the thin invisible line of my repulsion being crossed into the territory of me passed out on his floor because he nudges the faucet off with his elbow. I suppress actual gagging and a burble of bile as he slaps the sopping meat onto his cutting board. It dribbles a concerning liquid, forming a shiny pool into which Narcissus himself would not gander.

“You don't have to watch,” he says for the tenth time that evening. And he's right. I don't have to watch him. (I don’t have to do anything.) But I'm holding out for when he gets his hands around those fat girthy carrots we found at the market. I do so love to watch my man handle a big bulbous root vegetable.

It's about the little things in life.

“I know you don't like it,” he adds in a guilty tone, as if he’s responsible for my masochism.

Sweet gentle sir, don’t take that upon yourself. My masochism is a burden no man can carry. It’s a sisyphean cycle; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

_More weight!_

“You should have done this yesterday,” I say absently. Salted the skin yesterday to draw out the moisture, penetrate the meat. Lamb would give his birds an entire day to develop. The skin would snap like a biscuit.

“Don’t watch,” he repeats, a little flustered. "You're getting peaky."

I think of telling him that’s not what I meant, but then his curiosity would want to know why I know this or have any opinion on the preparation of barnyard fowl. And I would say “I did work in a restaurant, Snow,” which isn’t a lie but isn’t why I know this.

“I am attempting to overcome my weaknesses,” I reply coolly, eyes averted from the scene once more. It’s true. The butchering and preparing of meat has always done strange things to me. I long kept to the pastry prep areas of my past lives adamantly, for stepping foot in the roiling turbulence of a kitchen tempted the worst fate. Cooks will turn around, a half-stuffed pork tenderloin rolled up to their elbows like a pornstar's deep gape, boudin noir shoved into the channel of meat, and show you their most recent third degree burn bubbled up beneath two layers of latex gloves like that’s an appropriate way to make introductions.

(Or they are Lamb, and turn to you and-)

My mind’s running away, as it does, as it wants. I am its tireless victim; I am my own favorite tormentor.

Normally watching Snow operate in a kitchen soothes me, takes me to a happy place where nothing can go wrong. He's not quite methodical or clean about his work, but he's contagiously joyful; there’s humming and singing with lots of accompanying shimmying. He does this thing, with his butt (and logic dictates his sack o' meow bits as well): It’s spectacular. So much bubbly trembling to be had with his body.

He tried to teach me once. (“It’s all in the ankles, Baz.”) (My firm little tuchus cannot shimmy despite how much I involve my ankles. I confirmed this after several private attempts in my full length mirror. Mine is a body made for waltzing, not shimmying.)

(You're picturing this, aren't you? Please don't. It's sad. I'm a sad sad man who cannot shimmy. Spare yourself. Rattle a drawer of silverware as if you’re a beleaguered ghost; it’ll give you the same effect.)

Back to Simon Snow and his endless delights which I shall continue to list for all of our benefit.

He mumbles to himself when he cooks and bakes. Sometimes directions, innocently reminding himself of the next step or ingredient in the process; sometimes he flexes his prowess with dirty talk of both praise and threat until it's a singular titillating melange of slurred enunciations. I don't know who I have to kill to become a lump of brioche in my next life but if Simon Snow is ever sunk to his knuckles in the mess of me growling “I'm going to beat you until you behave, you beautiful buttery brat,” please don't intervene, everything is going according to plan, I am in my happy place. I've reached the peak of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Mostly though, Snow’s smiling and licking his fingers between tastings, his tongue poked free at the corner of his lips as he stirs. He feeds me samples off a spoon or finger and asks “good?” with bright eyes while I sip wine and nod severely and commentate and heckle. I have successfully upgraded him to feeding me grapes. I once drunkenly convinced him to peel them for me. Which he did. Because he adores me. Even if he did throw them at me and demand I catch them in my mouth. He had only one chance to celebrate nailing me in the back of the throat before he was forced to perform a brutalizing rendition of the Heimlich.

(There's a joke in there about me gagging for him, but it feels like low hanging fruit. You'll have to make one up for yourself. I can't do everything.)

Sitting across the kitchen counter from Simon Snow, knowing he'll feed me and kiss me, is unaccountably superior to watching him on television. No amount of fantasy is as good as the real thing.

You're a lucky lucky man, Basilton.

Simon Snow is not a chef (not like Lamb. Nothing nothing nothing like him.) He is, in the best and most total way, a home cook. He knows a few dishes to please the few people in his life. He spares me enough to put on the first song in his youtube suggests on his phone to drown out the sound when he drives the cheap yet efficient sysco knife through the thin bone and cartilage of the chicken and spatchcocks the bird relatively neatly, parceling away the spare bits for the Frankenstein refuse stock he'll devotedly simmer for two days.

I squeeze my eyes shut and listen to the bubblegum pop song until the rending stops. Just as I'd begun to hope he'd throw the bird into a pan and into the oven in a quick one-two and be done with the thing and risk opening my eyes, the sick bastard cuts between the skin and the fat and wiggles his hand into the pocket he's made, his knuckles bulging up grotesquely as he opens the skin and stretches it.

  
“You're ruining this for me,” I complain bitterly, holding my bottomless goblet of wine to my cheek in comfort. Doesn't he know this is essential to my limited mental health? Having been forced into the realization that I can no longer masturbate to the Simon Snow of GBBO-past, I've clung to my actual Simon Snow and the sweet sexual improv performed weekly in the relative safety of the kitchen. I should have known better. I can only trust the perfection of Pitch Pastry’s kitchen to protect me. My controlled environment.

His slick hand slides out only to return with the seasoned butter which he kneads into the chicken meat beneath the skin. I swallow hard, throat glugging audibly 

“Normally you get all randy when I cook.”

“Yes, when your hand isn't coated in salmonella. I can't entertain fantasies of _this_.”

I pout into my glass as he laughs at me. He turns his hand over within the bird and makes a spade of his fingers, fixing his eyes on mine as he imitates a rather foul and intimate act. I watch his arm move without fully focusing on the scene. I should look away, but I can’t. He’s taken my continued presence here as a dare, his pity for my condition expired.

“This could be you,” he teases.

It _could_ be me. Maybe I am capable of fantasizing about this. I'm lightheaded (the blood has gone somewhere evidently.) I’ve been reduced to envying poultry (in between fighting down vomiting or passing out.)

Think quick, Basilton, he knows too much. Time to lie: “I do have _some_ standards, Snow.”

Snow opens his mouth to protest that but is interrupted for the best.

“Woah, bro, right in front of my salad?” Shepard scolds as he ducks into the fray to upend a bag of “craisins” into the spinach and Gorgonzola salad he’s contributing to the evening. I’m fairly sure he found the accoutrement in the back of their cabinet next to some pre-war antique trail mix. (“You like salad, right, Baz?”)

Fucking omnivores. Morons. All of them.

Snow smacks his buttery hand onto the chicken like it's been particularly naughty. I wince. (That could be me.) (Look what this man does to my fine and distinguished sensibilities.)

“Just tenderizing it,” Snow deflects, slapping the poor thing again. Butter splatters out between his fingers in a squelch. My eyebrow twitches.

 _Am_ I aroused?

No.…no I don't think so. I certainly hope not.

I furtively glance at my crotch to double check. There are some signs of life twitching like a galvanized frog down there. I tut a chastisement at my cock: _Behave! Have some respect! Wretched creature. Who raised you?_

Me. I Did. The poor thing never stood a chance.

I should have hired a governess.

The wine glass in my hand lifts from my grip. Snow steals a sip from it, cheeky and only a little worried as his face squashes into a smile. (He’s yet reserved a little pity.) “Alright, love?”

I glare at his knowing look. The downside of dating Snow is his commitment to figuring me out. Sometimes I suspect he watches me sleep, but I can hardly accuse him of the crime when I do it myself. We're quite the pair.

“That's your glass for the rest of the evening,” I warn him. He's done a hack job wiping his less buttery but no less biowarfare-contagion hand off to take a drink from my glass but he's condemned the stemware to my eternal scorn.

Snow shrugs and gulps back the wine culturelessly, expression turning a little desperate as I remind him of the impending evening.

Fiona is joining us for dinner at Snow’s place. As is Bunce. By default so is Shepard because he lives here and gleefully reaps the reward of when we choose to cook and have a night in rather than poking around town. And my dear Simon Snow might be a touch nervous for dinner. In the same way that Bunce holds my flaws and mistakes against me, seeing me as a pointy needle to the sweet bubble of her friend’s happiness and well-being, Fiona so too views Snow.

I don't blame her. I actually appreciate her suspicion and malice although it grows exhausting to mediate my own growing feelings about Snow to her. (Feelings that are beginning to trend towards something worrisomely serious and truly sentimental.) Once she realized that Snow’s presence in Watford wouldn’t be a good laugh and instead resulted in me oscillating between moping and pining until Snow and I formed a semi-competent relationship, she’d swapped out her amusement for narrow-eyed aggression.

As we know by this point, Simon Snow can, and will, make friends with anything that catches his eye (and I mean anything - he kept a pebble he found on a bench and named it. It has googly eyes.) (Hell, he’s asked me on a date, on purpose, multiple times. He truly seeks to see the best in people. And rocks and minerals.) So stated, Simon Snow will befriend anything unless and except if the potential friend in question is “being a real dickhead.” Then Snow will bare his teeth and growl. It's both concerning and charming. I only find it charming because I can entertain fantasies of muzzling and gagging him.

(I was a dickhead to him but I’m very pretty so it cancelled out.)

Predictably, Fiona’s been a dickhead. It’s a family trait. As such, Snow and her are on the outs with each other. I wouldn’t normally care, as Fiona has never been part of my dating life (what dating life…), except for the reality that she is, in her own special way, fundamentally important to me.

It’s very odd. We’re all very confused by it. I’ve been forced to reflect upon my life choices.

We never had this kind of relationship before; I was always firmly her baby nephew, the leftover of her sister’s marriage, more relic than person. After my mother’s death, Fiona struggled. We all struggled. The struggle never ends, but some days it is more bearable; some days you forget you’re struggling (and guiltily double down on it the next day to make amends.) My father bricked up half his heart and made a new family that doesn’t quite look _like_ me or look _at_ me; Fiona rearranged her life around the place her sister had been, with me in the middle of that hole. Through a haze of alcohol and weed and often more, she watched me grow up, alternatively distantly and loyal. I knew she loved me, but she didn’t know what to do with a child. She was there, always there; I knew that if I needed her, I could have her.

When I did need her, at twenty-seven years old, crashing and burning into the fiery mess of my own making, there she was, with a space for me. It must have been there all along, hidden by a pile of dirty laundry.

I’ve explained this to Snow. I told him not to worry about it, to let it be, to let Fiona be, but no, silly me to think Simon Snow would just accept Fiona’s dislike.

“You’re my boyfriend, aren’t you?” he’d insisted, completely oblivious to my swooning foot pop at the determined heat of his voice. “She’s your family. The only family you wanna talk about. I want her to like me.”

“Fiona doesn’t like anyone.”

“Then I want her to trust me with you.”

Oh, fuck him. I hate when he uses words in certain arrangements with inflection and intention and says sentences that make me feel something in my tender beating heart. I need to get back to my master plan of making it so his mouth can do nothing but kiss me. I need to gag him. The universe clearly wants me to gag him. Who am I to defy the universe? I'm but a humble worm.

“Fiona doesn’t trust anyone. She’s a Pitch. A Pitch only trusts a Pitch.”

(Do I listen to myself before I speak? The self-sabotage, honestly.)

That puzzled him for a little. Sometimes I do that, throw a rubix cube into the monkey pen to give him something to worry his head over while I make my escape from his scrutiny and plan a second attack of kissing his neck until the idea fully vanishes from his mind.  
  
Except Snow’s horribly unbearably stubborn, so now he’s hosting a not at all suspicious dinner to make us all hold hands and sing kumbaya.

He should do with Fiona what I’ve done with Bunce; accept and acknowledge the status quo and ride it out till we die in mutual peaceful dislike. But then Bunce shows up with vegetarian biryani and a bottle of cab sauv (my favorite) and sits down beside me at the kitchen counter.

“Penny! That smells amazing,” Snow cheers, leaning over the counter to thunk his forehead into hers in questionable greeting as he takes a cartoonish sniff of her covered plate. “Is that your mum’s recipe?”

“Modified for Baz, but yes. Here,” she thrusts the bottle at me. “Make yourself useful and open this.”

Christ, she’s rude. Snow grins hopefully at me. I have a feeling he’s responsible for her having my preferred wine and edible food. (Yes, he’s making glazed carrots and rosemary mashed potatoes but that doesn't count.) I wish he were trying to loosen my personality up so he could loosen my asshole, but it’s not that kind of night. “Yeah, make yourself useful, Baz.”

“I’ve been overseeing operations,” I sniff but do as told for a change, fetching Bunce a wine glass. I had to buy glasses for Snow’s flat, and I don’t regret it, even if it did make him huffy for a day. His place is a mishmash of found objects; everything’s worn and chipped and second-hand. He doesn’t seem to realize how well I fit.

It’s fine. I see it enough for both of us. I know where I belong.

“Wedding cakes,” Bunce says to me after one full glass of wine, spitting the words like a curse she’s reluctant to bring into reality. I’m a little tipsy from all my essential spectating prior to her arrival, but even I don’t miss her abrupt transition into conversation. I thought we’d both been having a lovely time sitting in mutual silence, watching Simon and Shepard flutter around the flat. Simon’s preparing a feast, and Shepard’s up and down a step stool, hellbent on hanging tacky fairy lights from one end of the flat to the other. “That’s a thing you do. Is it treating you well?”

I look pointedly at Snow who pretends like he isn’t watching us interact. He's spending an absurd amount of time brushing egg wash onto his brioche dinner rolls. Bless his stupid heart. I wish I too believed butter and carbs made the world go round.

“It treats me well, Bunce, thank you for asking about my life. You’re so considerate for engaging with me. Teaching: that’s a thing you do. Is it treating you well?”

“It’s summer holiday,” she says tartly, following my eyes to Snow. “But yes. It treats me well. So nice that we can chat like this and be friends.”

“It’s very nice.” I offer her my wine glass to cheers. She does so without taking her eyes off Snow. Snow licks his lips nervously under our combined unimpressed gazes and scurries away to go cry into Shepard’s shoulder about our failure to be organic friends.

Bunce sighs heavily in the aftermath. “When’s your aunt do in?”

I turn my watchface towards me to confirm what I already know. “Technically, she should already be here.”

Bunce hums. “I do expect you not to let her be mean to Simon tonight.”

“Yes, I shall endeavor to protect his fragile feelings.”

Bunce, rather than insist Snow possesses oodles of masculine fortitude, attacks a parallel line of thought that tickles the back of my brain but doesn't quite spark to completion.

“He’s trying really hard to manifest a positive space,” Bunce says sharply. _Manifest a positive space._ I wonder if that’s something Snow learned at therapy. He skypes a therapist once a week. One he’s had for a few years. His old grief counselor. He told me she’s good. He’d fiddled with my hand and said it’s good to pour himself out. _“The feelings I have, they never run out. Keeps me from going under, if I let go a little bit every week.”_

He mourns a woman that wasn’t his mother. What am I doing for my mother? I don’t know if I’m so far drowned or all dried up with my end of that emotional spectrum. Tonight is not the night to self-reflect. One look at Bunce’s furiously urgent expression and any hope of self-reflection withers in the spectre of my face cast upon her ridiculous glasses.

“You should really deep condition your hair,” I tell her flatly, lashing out to an embarrassing degree. “Manifest some positivity into your split ends.”

If Snow gets mad at me for being a dickhead, I'll pretend I said it with more enthusiasm to help and less snide homosexual judgement.

She manages a phlegmy vibrato of disgust and then hits me where it hurts. “You over plucked your eyebrows.”

“My brows are impeccable,” I dismiss, turning away to discreetly check my reflection in my wine glass. My brows are half my personality, they can’t be anything less than perfect. They're pulling a lot of weight for the other half of my personality which is, well, my actual personality, and I've just made an excellent case for how shite it is. Or I am. One of the two. It, me, id, ego, one fish, two fish. I believe I've made my point.

I'm definitely tipsy. Fuck. 

Tonight is going to go badly. It has already begun to go badly, the blur of unnoticed and cumulative flaws of the evening snuck upon me while my eyes have drooped and my mind wandered to and fro in its ever pacing musings.

Shepard, sensing panic like thunder in the valley, squeezes between Bunce and I to top off our glasses. I'm both grateful and diseased by the action. Nothing to do but drink, as they say. The Romans said that. When in Rome, drink. (Snow, please come squeeze me. Where are you? Stop making things to eat and come squeeze me.)

“Baz, what did you make for dessert?” Shepard knows what I made for dessert because I made it here this afternoon while he asked a million questions and swindled a glass of rum off me.

“I was strongly encouraged to make tiramisu,” I say, casting a sidelong look at Bunce.

I spent an exorbitant amount of time making a mille-crepe tiramisu cake because it's Penelope Bunce’s favorite and I'm apparently currying her favor. (Just like Snow’s made rosemary pomme purée for Fiona. He's sieved the potatoes three times.) She'd had it for her 25th birthday. Simons tried to make her one before but his crepes reportedly wind up rubbery and thick. He was zero percent surprised that I owned a crepe pan. I made vague promises to make crepes in the morning for us. Shepard, having been in the vicinity of that conversation, failed to understand that I wanted to eat them in bed with a naked Simon Snow wrapped around me and had cheered at the prospect. I didn’t tell him off. He's growing on me. He likes me. I don't know why, but I don't plan to spit into the wind with him. I need someone in my corner. Allies and all that. He thinks I'm good for Snow. I want to be good for Snow.

(I want to be good.)

Bunce adjusts her shoulders to a less defensive line and hums thoughtfully. “Tell me something that will make me like you, Basilton Pitch.”

If I tell her something that I think might make her like me, I'm extending a hand for her to bite. It's so embarrassing to try. It's so embarrassing to be rejected.

I wrack my brain.

“Surely you have some positive quality to offer me,” she despairs. I could tell her that her best friend likes when I poke my nose into his asshole when I suck on his sack. That's not quite appropriate to discuss over cheese and crackers, even if its very nice lavender rubbed cave aged chevre and gluten free stone ground almond and polenta crackers. (Obviously brought by me.) Quality fromage only gets you so far.

“You first,” I manage to counter, pretending to be haughty while I cover for the blank space in my head. I gulp my wine audibly.

“I'm double jointed,” she offers.

“Weird,” I reply immediately.

“Oh my god,” Shepard gasps behind us, his knees trembling a little. Poor man.

Bunce rolls her eyes and ignores his yearning.

“I don't think I'm your target audience,” I amend awkwardly. Is this how other adults make friends? It seems more appropriate to share at summer camp during an ice breaker. If I announced myself as a finicky little fruit bat everywhere I went I'd get hate crimed.

“Yes but it’s cool,” and then she holds up her hand and bends her fingers backwards to an alarming angle that makes my brain roll over inside my skull. Nothing snaps or pops but my ears boom with pretending sounds of mutilation.

“Simon!” My voice quavers.

“Wha-Penny!” He's at my back, dinner rolls forgotten, conjured like a spell of protection to me. I sink backwards into his chest. “No circus tricks, Pen. He's sensitive about this shit.”

I don’t faint, not quite, but I want to puke into her lap all the same. It's a toss up on if that would endear me to her or further cement me as an irredeemable arsehole in her eyes. Her skirt isn't that cute. It might be a favor.

(Cock of Mary, I’m a dickhead.)

“Ooooooooh,” she sounds out, her glee well suppressed. She’s a dickhead too. Forget what I said earlier. Simon befriends saints and dickheads alike. “Sorry, Basilton. I thought it was just blood.”

“The Geneva Convention didn't die for this,” I complain into Snow’s bosom. He rubs my back comfortingly and tuts his there-theres. “There are laws.”

“I'll get you a carrot,” he soothes. “A girthy one. That knobby one you felt up at the market."

“I hate you.”

Fiona barges in at this moment. “I'm here. The party can start!”

“I hate you,” I repeat meaningfully.

“Oh fucking Christ,” Snow whispers into my hair. “Puke and rally, Baz. I need you.”

“Elope with me,” I threaten. "We have nothing to prove." I've been infatuated with him for years.

“Gimme a year, love.” He kisses my head. “Now get your shit together and help make your aunt like me or the wedding’s off.”

What a dickhead.

  
  


What I want to know is how hell are the semi-literate orphan and the American the most well-adapted people in the room right now? Fiona, Bunce, and I all must have been dropped as infants. If you scanned our brains, the part that lets you be nice and social would show up black.

“So, Snow,” Fiona drawls in that too-slow hot wax way she gets when she’s a few drinks deep. When did she get a few drinks deep? Christ, she probably pre-gamed on the doorstep before ringing up. “Baking. That’s a thing you do.”

Bunce and I exchange frantic looks. Is she thinking what I’m thinking? That we’re all equally awful at this? We chug our glasses in tandem.

“We suck,” she whispers. “Is that what we sound like?”

“I believe so,” I whisper back, pulling my knees to my chin and hanging on for dear life to my drink. The chicken is resting beneath foil. The dinner rolls have one minute left. Shepard floats by and tops me off before dropping with an ‘oomph’ beside Bunce and oh so casually throwing his arm around the back of the sofa behind her. She shifts oh so slightly against him.

Huh. I suppose that’s one positive from the night, not that I'm invested in those two. Snow’s been eagerly awaiting development there. (“They need to get it together, get functional, like us.”) _Functional_. What a thought. He thinks I’m functional. Functionally dysfunctional. 

“Snow,” I demand to the room at large. He looks away from Fiona to me with a perky expression, imaginary labradoodle tail wagging at me calling his name. _Come boy. Down boy. Sit. Stay. Now give kisses. Give daddy kisses. We love kisses. Yes, lots of kisses!_ I’m functional, I deserve kisses.

“Yeah?” He asks after an extended minute of silence where I've uselessly dissolved into my usual rote of deplorable thoughts. “...Baz? Alright?”

I swear I had something important say to him. Maybe I just needed attention.

Oh. Right. Drunkenly pointing out that Bunce and Shepard are borderline cuddling. Hmm, on better thought, don’t call attention to it. Bad Baz. I shake my head a little and he shakes his in mirror motion, then nods his a little so I nod back. We're functional.

Fiona pats Snow’s elbow like they're suddenly mates. “Don't mind Baz. He's useless. You should have seen him when he first saw you.”

(I don't know if she means on the telly or in real life. I don't want to find out.)

“You're right but don't say it,” I mutter, too low for anyone but Bunce and Shepard to hear. I don't know how the three of us wound up sunk into the sofa while Snow and Fiona took up the two uncomfortable stools at the kitchen counter. I think Fiona wanted him to make her a drink and he was trying to play hostess with the mostess. Why are we doing this in his flat again?

Bunce digs her fat elbow into my ribs. “Make me like you,” she orders.

“I let my neighbors outdoor cat into my flat in the winter.”

“Damnit,” Bunce hisses, won over. “That's decent of you.”

I look at her pitifully. Maybe she’ll squeeze me while my boyfriend’s busy trying to seduce my aunt. She looks like she’d get the job done. “I can be decent.”

“To cats,” she dismisses but it's enough to win her over this far. She unleashes all her capable conversational fodder on Fiona, instigating an argument about a scandal in local politics that embarrasses Fiona’s old schoolmate enough to capture my aunt’s attention. It transitions us into dinner where the chicken is crisp (according to everyone else), the biryani is delicious and the girthy glazed carrots sweet. I pull my shit together enough to orchestrate Shepard into one of his unwinded dissertations into the cultural moralizing of fairy tales and the, who fucking knows, the feminist mystique of Disney princess sexuality or whatever the latest Twitter fights about, until we teeter into dessert and cocktails with limited antagonism between all party members.

“Hey,” Snow finally squeezes me (thank fuck, finally!) to him while we both pretend to take too long making espresso martinis. I kiss his cheekbone and then his mouth. I feel like I haven't touched him all night. It’s wildly unacceptable. “Hey,” Snow repeats. He sounds a little out of breath; the night’s put him through his paces. He tried so hard.

“Are you satisfied yet? She liked the chicken.”

“Does she like me?” He blinks those big beautiful blue eyes of his. He's such a cliche, I hate him.

“Sure.” I twist an orange peel over the martini glasses, the oil shimmering out from the brilliant rind in a glittering wet burst. It takes all of my control not to bring my fingers to my nose to huff the citrus residue like a toddler after glue. “She positively adores you.”

She'd liked the potatoes at least. That I can say in confidence. I don't though. I know it's not what Snow’s looking for from this evening. I want to give it to him, whatever it is he wants.

He smacks the cocktail shaker together, chilled espresso from Pitch and an astounding amount of vodka turning over a slush of ice.

“Baz,” he whines. “Did you at least get along with Penny?”

“We reached an understanding,” I allow, giving him room to shake the cocktail. As he pours, I press in behind him, wrapping my arms around his generous bulk and tuck my mouth to his freckled ear. “I want you.”

I want to be alone with him. I don't care much what happens after that. I want to slide into bed with him so our feet tangle and our hands find the secrets dips of each other's bodies. I'm buzzing and warm with alcohol and food, thoroughly convinced that Snow’s ever-hungry mouth on my skin would solve all of my lingering anxiety.

“Aah, fuck, yeah, that sounds good,” he agrees in a low growl. I push my cock into the seam of his jeans. He lets me mime my intentions for two blissful seconds of pressure before turning in my embrace to kiss me far too chastely to satisfy any of my cravings. “Aren't you supposed to be the fruity one?”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“I dunno.” He shrugs. “Better at entertaining? C’mon, you had, like, _soirées_ growing up.” He pinches my hip. “Soirée a little.”

“What did we say about the French?” I threaten. Here I thought he and I had an alliance on the matter. So much for national pride. So much for convincing him to skive off and spread his legs for me. What's a man have to do to get his cock wet around here? Soirée. I'll show him soirée.

He pinches my ass next. “They're twats with good food.”

That's a little better. I pat his cheek and lift my chin to give him a confident look. “You’re a very good boyfriend. Fiona is a fool if she doesn’t see how good you are to me.”

He blushes; his freckles pop with his pinkening. “M’trying.”

He’s so good it throws all of my shortcomings into stark relief. He’s blinded by his own radiance that he fails to see how shite I am. I glow like the moon, nothing but stone if not for his sunlight. (I want to be good too.) He’s brilliant. He’s painfully beautiful.

I need everyone to vacate this flat immediately.

I cap their martinis off with an extra shot of vodka that threatens to spill over the chocolate syrup dipped rims (these have been borrowed from my own stemware.) I'll give them a tidy nip and see them into their ubers and then I'll throw Snow into his unmade bed and ride him into a delirious happily ever after; I’ll make him feel so good he’ll want for nothing else in the world.

From the depths of my arsehole, I pull out all of my charm like a magician’s rabbit from a hat and soiree the fuck out of the remainder of the evening. I make Bunce laugh. I make Shepard pull out his phone to fact check an outrageous claim. I force Fiona into agreeing with Snow on a few points, encouraging the two of them to gang up on me together as I play into both of their inclinations to tease me.

Good, good, yes yes, dance, monkeys, dance.

Bunce squeezes my hand at her first bite of tiramisu. Snow beams at me, fork halfway to his mouth. I hold his eyes. I’ve never seen him lose track of his own food but he keeps smiling until I take a bite of cake and nod to him and then he attacks his plate, moaning and swallowing showily and making too much of me. I preen.

“Baz should have been on Bake Off, not me,” Snow declares, smacking the table. He’s a little drunk now too. “Fucking - ruthless. He would have demolished everyone.”

“It’s not an American show,” I tsk, though I’m pleased. I would demolish everyone. Even the pre-show psych eval wouldn’t have stumped me. “Don’t force such brutality into something so wholesome.”

“Here, here,” Shepard agrees.

Fiona snorts and leers across the table at me. “The only thing Baz wanted to demolish in Bake-Off was Snow.”

Oh sweet gentle Christ.

Snow scrubs his hand up the back of his neck bashfully. “Yeah, he would. I’m big enough to know he’s the better baker.”

“Boo, hiss,” Bunce decries, ever-loyal to her friend even as she licks her fork clean of mousse and dives into the savaged cake plate for more.

Fiona, with the same drooping eyes as me, slides her attention to each of us before lazering in on my silently pleading expression. She smells an easy kill. A weakness in the herd. She’s just bored enough to want to do it too, the mad woman. A Pitch can’t even trust a Pitch. 

“Fi,” I say, just once. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Her smile slices me open. She’s not my friend at all. “You haven’t told your beau that you’ve lusted after him for years?”

Snow darts his eyes between my aunt and me. He smiles crookedly. “Lusted?”

“I believe I phrased it as rooting for him,” I say primly, sitting back in my chair.

“That’s the understatement of the century. Shouldn’t he be flattered?” She twists to stare Snow down. “You should be flattered Baz has had a crush on you for years. He’s been a good little princess in the tower waiting for you to come rescue him. Practically grew back his hymen.”

“Uhm?” Snow darts his eyes around some more. He’s going to detach his optic nerves at this rate.

“Simon knows I appreciated his work,” I defend lamely, irritation prickling my cheeks and ears hot. I shouldn’t have to defend this. There should be no defending. I can sense Bunce and the American making eyes at each other in silent witness to my embarrassment. I don’t care about their optic nerves. They both have glasses; it’s all downhill for them. “Don’t be crude, Fiona.”

“Me, crude?” She barks a hyena’s laugh, the fucking carrion eater, my pride a dead and feasted upon wreckage. “You’re the one who wanked to him when he wore his cursed gray trackies. Loudly, I might add.”

“What?” Snow stumbles to a conclusion of disturbance, finally choosing to settle his eyes on me.

“I did no such thing,” I dismiss.

“Simon Snow is the only good thing in this world-”

“-now you’re just being hyperbolic-”

“-I’ll never find a man like him-”

“-Well it’s ironic now-”

“And he cried big sopping tears when you were eliminated-”

“-only out of second-hand embarrassment that the man can’t make a meringue!” My fork clatters to my plate as I throw it down in outrage. The room sucks in a gasp. Fiona expels it for all of us in more outrageous laughter. I warned her off being cruel to Snow tonight and she’s turned her relentless thorniness onto me in revenge for the attempted moderation. “For fuck’s sake, Fiona.”

“You, uhm, you uh, lus--, uh, cried?” Snow asks quietly, flabbergasted, derailing his initial question and choosing the more tactful option. He shouldn’t be surprised. He’s well acquainted with my lusts. I wanted to fuck him in the kitchen half an hour ago.

“I have proof!”

“Fiona!”

“Show me!” Bunce throws herself halfway into Fiona’s lap.

I trust no one. Traitors. Heathens. Proletariat! I hope someone fucks with the tax brackets in my favor next term.

“This seems rough,” Shepard commiserates gently, sitting back. He’s biting his lip and drumming his fingers on the table. “And a matter of ethics.” He raises his hands, weighing invisible scales or fondling invisible balls; it’s unclear which; I choose to think he’s fondling balls. “To satiate my curiosity or to respect Baz’s privacy.”

“I want to see,” Snow says at length, looking at me.

I glare. “Simon, don’t you dare.”

“But you cried about me,” he pouts. He doesn’t believe Fiona. He’s embarrassed, splotchy and red, but he’s not quite convinced. The idea of me having watched him and been emotionally stirred by him escapes his tiny lovely mind. He still operates under the assumption that I only watched his season of GBBO after he moved to Watford as a form of research, as a way to plot against his bakery before we formed our romantic allegiance to each other. I considered it a kind of mercy to let him live life so blissfully ignorant and free from my grubby raccoon hands smearing my well-tended and depraved fantasies over such an innocent time in his life. He doesn't need to know I used him to claw myself out of a deep dark hole. “Shouldn’t I get to see?”

“I’ll cry for you another time,” I barter, desperate, reduced to negotiating with terrorists. “We can watch a sad movie and-”

The matter is decided for me.

 _“He’s so stupid!”_ my tinny voice wails from Fiona’s phone. _“You overbaked it, you numpty. You fucking useless muppet.”_

Snow stands up slowly and circles around the table to stand behind Fiona’s shoulder. I put my face into my hands and surrender all forms of hope.

 _“Aw, Baz, did your boyfriend fuck up?”_ Fiona teases a worse-off Basilton of two years past.

“ _He was perfect, Fi. He was - was -,”_ fuck, I’d really been sobbing. Had I been sobbing that much? I sound ruined. I sound awful. Those were dark times. “ _He’s so beautiful,_ ” past me blubbers. “ _Why can’t I have nice things? Why do men do this to me? Make me believe in them only to shit it all away? Why did you make me gay?”_

_“You’re gay because Malcolm neglected you.”_

_“Fuck off, Freud,”_ past-me threatens. _“Simon Snow is dead to me. He can’t make a fucking pavolva cake.”_

“Oi,” Simon Snow protests in real life in real time in full colour and surround sound. “Fuck meringue.”

“God!” I burst at the exact same time as the me in the video also blasphemes.

“ _God! I’m going to bend him over a table and pipe meringue directly up his arse if I ever meet him.”_

Jesus fucking christ, I don’t remember saying that, but I absolutely understand the sentiment. Which means I know what I’m about to say next. Past me and present me aren’t different creatures.

“ _And then eat it back out of him.”_

“Wow,” Bunce surmises, rising to her insubstantial height and backing away from the offending device. “I think it’s time we all leave now.”

“Aww, I’m having fun,” Fionta says. “I’ve got loads of this stuff. I think Baz had a shrine.”

“No,” Shepard vocally steps into the middle of the scene, “No. I think it’s time we leave now. Penny, want to go get a drink with me?”

“Many,” she agrees. “Many drinks.”

“Party poopers,” Fiona protests. “I think it’s _romantic_.”

Simon Snow remains painfully silent. I don’t lift my face. I can’t lift my face. I think I’ll just die here.

“Thanks for dinner,” Fiona says as she departs. “It was delicious. Snow, so glad we could bond like this. Great job with my nephew!"

The door snicks shut behind her. The flat descends into an impossible silence. I haven’t heard a peep out of Snow and I’m afraid to look. The floorboards creak beneath his weight. The whole world tilts. I refuse to look.

“Baz-”

“Don’t.”

Snow doesn’t.

Silence stretches.

“Uhm,” he tries again.

“Leave me to die,” I beg him. “Leave me here to rot.”

“It’s uh, I can’t - it’s my flat.”

“Fine!” I snap, lifting my mortified face to him. He looks shell-shocked and damaged. He looks like a shelter dog whose had a camera shoved into its face to make a guilt-trip ad. He looks disturbed by me. He should be. “You can roll my body to the curb. Put me out with the bins.”

“Uhm. Okay,” he mumbles, picking up the remains of dinner from the table in a clatter of mismatched forks and plates. “I’m gonna do the washing up.”

I drop my head back to my hands and wallow for a good minute before pushing out my chair and gathering the glasses. “Stop, I’ll do it.”

The least I can do is wash up.

He stops too readily, not even letting me get so far as within arm’s reach before he flees the kitchen with a “sure okay,” and vanishes into the bathroom. The shower turns on a beat later; he’s no doubt trying to scrub me off his skin. I wash the dishes with trembling hands, senseless to the hot water burning me. I fill the sink to the brim with bubbles and vanish all the mess of the night away. I scrub the plates clean. Wipe the table. Dry the drink glasses. I put the kitchen into order, one mismatched thing at a time.

I’ve just begun on the roasting pan when Snow re-appears, taking my elbow gently and extracting my hand from the sink. “That water’s too hot.”

“It’s fine.”

He runs a cold tap over my scorched red knuckles. He’s steam-warm, smelling of his cheap soap. He scrubbed me off him. But he’s touching me again.

“That was embarrassing,” he murmurs, underwhelmed, pressing against my back, wrapping an arm around my waist to rub my stomach. “Did you eat enough?”

“That’s it?” I question, trembling anew. Maybe I never stopped. “That’s embarrassing, did I eat enough?”

“Yeah.” He’s the perfect height to let his lips naturally find the base of my neck. The summer night is warm, the mugginess penetrating the walls of the flat. Maybe it’s him, the damp heat of him swelling up against me. “I already know you’re fucking crazy.”

“I am.”

“Fucking weird as shit.”

“Yes.”

“Did you say nasty things about me on the internet?”

He only recently made a social media account for Sweet&Snow after Bunce and I convinced him of its necessissty. The hyperbolic lusts of strangers on the internet alarmed him during his fifteen minutes of fame. He doesn’t like when strangers think about him the way strangers so often do. I was a stranger. I am strange.

I drop my chin to my chest and let him scrape his teeth punishingly over the knobs of my spine as they rise in sacrifice to his mouth.

“No.” I use my instagram for professional photos of my work and anonymous commentless stalking. “But I thoroughly agreed with many of the aforementioned nasty things other people said about you.”

I’m not the only person on this planet who wants Simon Snow to lick the taste of them off his lips and beg for more. It’s the common thread tying humanity together.

He doesn’t kiss my neck again but he doesn’t pull back either. His chin digs into my shoulder a little. “Did you eat enough?” he repeats, back to rubbing my stomach. “Sorry I made chicken.” Fiona likes chicken, and she’d been his mission tonight.

I sigh and surrender to his topic change. He doesn’t want to talk about it. I should be grateful. We can pretend it never happened; that he didn’t watch a video of me post-Lamb (I’m always post-Lamb), in a swamp of blankets and takeout and cheap wine, projecting my desires and disappointments on his innocent form.

“Everyone liked your chicken.”

“It’s cause I spent so long washing it.”

“You defiled it.”

He hums and squeezes me. “You want to defile my butthole.”

I groan and slump against him. “I do. I do. Don’t make me apologize for it.”

“I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to,” he says in a reasonable tone.

“You’re too good to me.” He is. He is.

“I’m a useless muppet,” he mocks, tugging me to the bathroom. “Who can’t make meringue.”

“You’re too good to me,” I repeat, wanting to kiss him, nervous to kiss him. “You’re so beautiful.”

He snorts and shakes his head downwards, away, fascinated with the floorboards beneath him. “So you said.”

“Simon…” It’s my needy voice. My _kiss me kiss me_ voice. It always works on him. I am mute but for his name; I am a small god of many tongues.

“I’m about to konk out,” he says, miming a yawn and shuffling back towards his bedroom. I am unkissed. “Shep’s gonna be out late, I think, so uh, - are you staying the night still?”

I swallow. “If that’s okay.”

“Yeah!” He yawns for real this time. “Let’s have a lie in.”

“Crepes?”

“Sure!” He offers me a smile. I’m desperate for the crumbs of his affection right now. “C’mon. I’ll be big spoon.”

It’s enough to get me going on my nightly routine. (He’s long since surrendered a drawer to me in the vanity and his battered dresser.) I apply a bit of cologne before leaving the bathroom to crawl into Snow’s cheap bed. He would have been better off building the frame himself than thrifting the first one he could find on marketplace. He mocks my antique mahogany bedroom set that I hauled out of my family home but at least I don’t worry about the weight of two grown men shattering it, only if the floors of the building will keep me from crashing down atop one of Pitch’s ovens in my sleep.

He’s mostly asleep when I join him, but he dutifully opens his arms for me to slide in for the promised cuddles. When he lies on his side like this, his ample chest smashes together into a tidy pillow for my cheek.

“You smell good,” he slurs, nuzzling into me. He smacks his lips and blows outs a spluttering breath as my hair catches in the wet seam of his mouth. I shuffle down, tangling our legs, fit under his chin and press my face into the soft of him. I want to be smaller than him. I want to be gently crushed. I want him to kiss me and he hasn’t and I’m scared to ask for it. It’s so embarrassing being rejected. I’m embarrassing.

“I’ll make lemon crepes in the morning,” I promise into his cleavage. An approving grunt vibrates directly into my nose. He slides a thick thigh between my own like he knows I like, replacing the pillow I sleep with between my legs when I’m alone so my knobby knees don’t clatter against each other and bruise me. My body is as self-agonizing as my mind; all of me knows how to hurt all of me. Simon Snow doesn’t wait to be the soft thing between me and my quotidian pain.

(If I told him not kissing him was to suffer, my lips would never grow cold.) (If I told him-)

He hums his way into a snore, unaware. I try my best to follow.


	2. Manhandled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Love is easy. Recovery and relationships are work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter directly addresses baz's categorically abusive relationship with lamb. see endnotes for a detailing of it for potential triggers. baz mostly tells simon a very....sanitized version of it; the flashbacks of Lamb do not really incorporate their relationship very much, mostly just how it got started.

I wake up alone. Thirsty. Aching to piss. Probably only not pissing myself because I’m chubbed with morning vigor. Sleeping with Snow does that to me; waking up with him does that to me. _Down boy, nothing to see here._ There’s a cold cup of tea on the nightstand; it's cute how he thinks I'll wake up on my off days to match his absurd morning persona. (I adore him.) (He knows getting caffeine into me first thing is step one for a happy Bazzy.)

I suspect he keeps a list in his head for me: _the care and feeding of your fussy boyfriend._

  * Make sure he eats real meals. Him licking the back of a spoon is not a meal.
  * He will be cranky in the morning. Rub his belly. Play with his nipples.
  * Make sure he has coffee or black tea. In dire times, Red Bull.
  * Let him complain without giving him advice. He's way more clever than you. He just wants to vent.
  * No pumpernickel after four, he gets gassy.



  
Shepard’s awake to greet me, sitting at the kitchen counter drinking coffee and reading one of his research books, a highlighter stuck out of his mouth.

“Suh,” he waves.

I dump out the tea Snow left me (I don’t trust the stagnate milk, sorry love) and accept his offering of his french press with a grunt of gratitude. Half a cup later, I manage to rasp out a polite: “How was your night?”

(See, Bunce, I’m civil.)

Shepard adjusts his glasses and caps his marker. “Good. Good. I asked her if she wanted to get drinks again come the weekend.”

“Well done, you.” I raise my cup in a cheers. “Snow will be pleased with your progress.”

Shepard shifts a little. “I hope.” He looks down at his book. Snow wants Shepard to move to England on a permanent basis. For all I know, he’s been plotting with Bunce to tempt Shepard into forfeiting his citizenship and learning the lyrics to God Save the Queen.

“Simon was leaving when I woke up.”

“Oh.” That answers my next question. My nails make the faintest chirp of noise as I tap them thoughtfully against my mug. “Did he say where?”

“Bakery.”

We’re both closed today, and I didn’t think he had any prep work. This doesn’t bode well. “Shepard,” I hedge carefully. “How...bad was last night?”

“Scale of one to ten? Like an eight. I’ve definitely had worse dinners. This one time-”

I lose forty minutes of my morning to one of Shepard’s endless stories that ends with him at a party with Tom Hooper and a man who insisted he saw Bigfoot. I’m fairly sure Shepard is a shared hallucination at this point because I never understand the reality that allows him to exist. He’s an odd creature and too friendly for his own good. No wonder he and Snow get on so well.

“Will you make me crepes, please?” he asks after making a second pot of coffee. He’s impossible to resist. I make Shepard crepes with the leftover batter from yesterday. We pretend like I’m not glancing at the door every five minutes looking for Snow to burst through, led by his bottomless hunger and keen nose.

“I’ll do the dishes.”

“Leave my pan alone.”

"Go, leave." He waves me off. “I think he’s had enough alone time.”

I pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about and slink out of the flat to find my boyfriend. I debate calling Fiona to bitch at her, but I’m not going to instigate a fight until I know how mad I should be. What did she hope would happen? Was my embarrassment so thrilling? Is this revenge for ignoring her advice and pursuing Simon Snow even though it will surely lead to heartbreak and another spiral? Is this her revenge upon him for the Coven wedding, even after all these months? Has she been biding her time to twist the knife? Is she trying to show him my worst to prove that he wouldn’t love me? Or maybe it is just funny and ironic and a bit romantic is a terrible way. Who knows. I don’t. I don’t have any good sense left in me. I think I gave it up, gave it away. My soft heart and my trembling hands. I fed it to others.

It was Snow’s second episode that won my heart, that doomed and saved me.

_“Now where did you learn to bake, Simon?”_

_“Oh, uh, heh, uhm, bit funny. Bit sad. Am I allowed to say sad things here?”_

_“You’ve said a lot of things we’ll have to edit out, so go ahead and do the sad bits too.”_

_“OH! I’m sorry. I’m *bleep*, oh god, did it again, *bleep*-”_

_“Simon. Should we walk away? Leave you with your loaf?”_

_“No, I’ll be good. Here, c’mere, smell this. Best smell in the world. I had a friend, a really nice lady. Half mum half kooky aunt, I think, uhm, sounds right. She’s uhm, she’s not with me anymore. But she taught me how to bake since I was a lot younger. I looked so hard when she met me, think she just wanted to feed me and keep me out of trouble, yeah? I read in a magazine how people showing a house will bake cinnamon rolls to make it smell homey or some *bleep*. I think bread does the trick. Like casting a magic spell. Can’t think of a homier smell than bread. Makes me feel like I had a home my whole life. A warm hunk of bread and cold butter. That’s all I need to feel at peace. I might eat some right now and settle my nerves.”_

_“Are you nervous? You’re doing very well. Lovely bouncy dough you’ve got right there.”_

_“Oh, yeah, I’m always nervous. When these come out the oven, I’ll calm down.”_

_“Very good. Carry on, Simon.”_

I remember watching him that episode and thinking how lovely he was. How simple the luxury he described, true and uncomplicated. _“What a lovely man he is, Fiona.”_ If only she had recorded that. If only she knew what I really fantasized about when it came to Simon Snow.

I want his spellwork now. I want to walk into Sweet&Snow and feel at home. I want I want I want. I want to lay down in the puddled light of him like a cat and stretch and sprawl and trust, close my eyes and purr for him. Melt in the warmth of him. Retract my claws, unfang myself, offer up my belly. Stroke me, eat me, don’t make me ask for it. Eat me, Simon Snow, the prickling bones of the man I am. I’m mad. I’m mad.

I want to live on the bread and butter of Simon Snow’s affection. The door waits unlocked for me to open my way to him. Sweet&Snow smells like a dream. It looks like a nightmare.

Simon Snow is trying to make macarons.

Like I've done before, I slip in unnoticed, winding around his large island prep table, the wood glossy and warm in the summer morning spilling through his high windows. He's been bitching about the humidity affecting his rise; now he's bitching to himself about his egg whites. He doesn't know my pain.

There's a video playing on his phone, a woman narrating the macaronage technique. From this angle and distance I can already see that he overwhipped his egg whites, too stiff, and now his almond flour and confection won't incorporate kindly. He's battering the mix to shit against the bowl, turning it one way and then the next. He's not counting, not that it matters anymore. He needs to restart from scratch.

“Simon.”

He spins and throws the silicone spatula at me like a tomahawk before registering who I am. It sails past my head in a trail of white fluff and scattered unmixed almond flour. I'm lucky it wasn't the entire bowl.

“Jesus fuck! Baz you creepy - I'm putting a bell on you. You scared the dickens out of me.” He puts his hand to his chest and everything; so dramatic.

“Do you require a fainting couch?”

“I'll show you a faint couch,” he harrumphs nonsensically.

“Nice to know you can defend yourself.” I retrieve his spatula from the floor and drop it off at the three compartment before winding back to him, slow and cautious. “What are you doing.” It’s not a question.

He peers into his sad bowl sadly. “Uhm,” he sads.

“Because it looks like you're trying to make macarons. Emphasis on the try, love."

There's a sheet pan of flat cracked and tragic shells sat on the table, the failure glaring up boldly. Round one I imagine. He can't have been at this long. Did he let them dry before baking them? It would have taken a couple of hours. When did he leave me? I should have asked Shepard when he awoke.

“Maybe.” Snow laughs nervously and scrubs a hand through his curls, realizing his mistake immediately as his gesture sticks and snags and snarls. “I'm a mess.”

That makes two of us.

“What happened to our lie in?”

“Couldn’t do the lying part.” He shrugs and wipes his hand off on the nearest towel; a curl sticks to his forehead, tangling into his eyebrow. “You know how restless I get.”

I nod sagely. He kicks like a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits some nights. If he woke up with something on his mind, keeping himself in bed would have been impossible. He craves movement and production, a place to burn off his steam.

“If you wanted to do this, you should have woken me.”

“You’da bit my head off if I woke you up on your day off to come faff about,” he waves his hand at the small wreckage.

“I'd prefer it to waking up alone,” I mutter, crossing my arms and squeezing myself a bit. “Macarons?”

He grunts and makes another encompassing gesture at the scene. “Wondered if I could manage a meringue.”

“Dear lord, did I offend you?” My voice squawks with indignation. I'm going to slap him. “Simon Snow - is that what you took away from that bloody video?”

“I feel like…saying yes is the wrong answer,” he says haltingly, squinting at me.

“You're a moron. Truly.”

“Okay, I guess, what, I uhm, somehow got, uhhhh, offended by the wrong thing? Yeah? Alright.” He smacks the bowl down on the table and makes a vague attempt at wiping away the stickiness streaked up his wrist. He’s angry now, starting to simmer and chameleon his way into a grumpy ruddy flush. “Cool. Cool, Baz."

“How- walk me through this, love - _how_ in the nine _hells_ did you take me being a drunk disgusting heathen mess detailing the profane acts I want to commit against your profoundly wonderful bottom as a,” I can't wrap my mind around it, “as a reasonable critique of your baking skills?”

He closes one eye to squint at me like a drunkard trying to steady the room. I have to look as gobsmacked as I feel. I make a concerted effort to put more gobsmackery into my expression so he can't miss it. He opens both eyes and then closes the other one, squinting once more. Christ. I make a mental note to shove him off to an optometrist. I hope it's a squint. If he thinks he's winking then that's a whole other problem. Maybe he really did detach his optic nerve last night with all his cartoonish displays.

“Baz. You were _sobbing_ in that video," he says matter of fact.

I grimace. “That still doesn't clarify-”

“Because of me!” He sputters, flapping the towel at me. “And you never told me. Months, Baz. You've known me for _months_ now and you didn't tell me you liked me so much. I mean. Or even like. Like you barely acknowledged that - you didn't even want to tell me you watched me on it -”

“Because I'm horribly embarrassed-”

“That you liked me?”

“That- well, yes, that. I mean, no, Simon, not that I liked you-” I like him now. I more than like him. Fuck me, I love him. That’s even worse. Of course I love him. I loved him in my imagination and I love him now.

“That you perved on me?”

“Obviously that wasn't my best-”

“That I'm just going to be another man who lets you down?”

My teeth click shut.

He bugs his eyes at me before sighing heavily, slumping against his prep table. He blows a noisy gust from his lips, making them spit and raspberry. He’s a menace. “You make me fucking bonkers.”

“Just bringing you down to my level,” I mutter icily.

He shakes his head slowly, all but one of his curls shifting gently. “You're a piece of work, Pitch. Hard work.”

“I know.” At times it's a point of pride, a standard of expectation I can throw into peoples faces and prove them the less desirable, the less considerate. It's them, not me. They can't keep up with me. They don't deserve me. I'm alone by choice, I'm alone because no one else suits me. That's not the case here. I don't want to be hard for Simon. I'm easy for him. I want to be so easy to have and to hold.

I take one of the towels from the table to drop over a splat of meringue on the floor and scuff my foot across it wordlessly.

“I like working hard, Baz,” Snow adds quietly, firmly.

All of me tenses up and bursts with a “fuck” that makes him laugh a little, a little desperate. I’m a lot desperate. I brace my hand on his prep table, the wood solid and grounding, the faintest prick of semolina beneath my fingertips like fine sand. It's always here, isn’t it. It’s always in a kitchen. It’s in this unsilent place, the equipment humming with the breath of electricity, in motors and vents. It’s in the smell of flour baked nutty and the brown mouthfeel of hot butter steeped into the air. This kitchen with its warm light and drunken ferment that makes my mouth water and swim with delicious anticipation.

I could have had a life free from this. Snow asked me that, early on in our romance.

_“You’re well to-do. Didn’t go in for the Oxbridge thing?”_

_“I was there for a term.”_

He’d been ever curious and too persistent to distract that day. I wonder who he would have been had he had the same foot-up as I. I exchanged it. I like hard work too. (I think I just like making things more difficult for myself.) Father had been beyond livid with me when I slipped from my rightful glory into pastry school, eighteen and fool-hardy; passion-filled and craving the ability to hold my work in my hands. Hungry. Starved. Bored and wild. No more theoretical, no more rhetorical. I wanted proof. I wanted something solid.

I’d always been told kitchens were the last land ruled by meritocracy. If you were good, you were good. If you weren’t, you weren’t.

I took my trust fund and my disinheritance and didn’t look back. Of course, I still had my money. I still had my connections. My name. I still cheated my way up, slick hands and slick words. I hopped countries to put some distance between what I’d been born into and what I wanted to become.

My work is not bread and butter, but it’s still spellwork. I conjure and alchemize. I enchant. I take the raw and materialize a moment. Crisp and creamy, puckering sour, refreshing acidity, smooth aromatics; the spike of peppermint; the unexpected scald of chili in chocolate. Cakes that bloom and meringue that curls gold under flame. I put the seven wonders on the tongue. Your anniversary trifle and your wedding cake; the pick-me up at the end of a hard day; the unexpected gift; the get-well, the celebration. The treat and treasure. Mouthfuls of delicious. Eat me eat me eat me out of your hands. I want to inspire gluttony. I want delicious everday.

(I want bread and butter.)

“Macarons aren’t hard once you’ve been shown how.” I find my voice and my strength and close the distance between us. Snow lifts his face to keep me in his sight and purses his lips, horribly patient for me to swoop down and kiss him. It’s my turn to reach out. It’s my turn to do the hard work. I should have kissed him last night instead of running away inside my head.

He sucks in a sigh, trading his sugared breath for my coffee bitterness. His sticky hands come to my hips, kneading at the bone of me. He holds me like a gentle prayer between his palms, kissing me with simple comfort. I linger in it, eased and righted by his mouth.

“Will you show me how?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Are we talking in metaphors?”

“Yes.”

He nods and sways us, our affection spun around in the warm drafts of the kitchen. “It’s not about the meringue, is it?”

“I think you’re perfect.”

“Nah.”

“I don’t want to be hard work.”

“Makes me feel like I’ve earned you.”

We’re dancing lazy turns round in each other’s arms. A sleepy song rings in my head. Simon and his brekky toast and daily joys. His curls spring and blossom beneath my cheek as I rest my face against his temple.

“You’re a bigger numpty than I thought if you don’t know you already have me.”

I don't have to do anything I don't want to; I want him to have me.

He tightens his arms around me and huffs hotly into my neck, the noise stuck between frustration and pleasure. I am a thorn, a delicious prick. I want to be trapped in his paws.

“Squeeze me,” I beg. “Hold me.”

He lifts me as easily as ever, steady and strong. I enjoy weightlessness and the defiance of gravity before he settles me atop the butcherblock and pulls me to the very edge, guiding my thighs around him, bracing his palms on my back, my neck. I lock my ankles, pinch my knees; I try to fit him inside the pit of me. I want to fill up on him, turn round and whole in his shape. I tuck my face into his shoulder and curve beneath his hands.

“I’ve got you,” he assures me.

“Simon.”

He hugs me tight enough to break me, to jamb the pieces back together. I groan into his shoulder and sink my teeth into him, propelled by a drooling instinct to have him in my mouth. I want his cock, I want his tongue. His fingers. I want to be full. I cannot unfang but he is meaty enough to endure me. He is so much. He laughs and presses the air out of me, cups the back of my head and cradles the echo of my bite.

“You’re a loon.”

I leave a spitty ring on his shirt and mouth my way to his earlobe, sucking and nibbling. He shivers under the tip of my tongue. I hiss my sibalant desire until he obeys and catches my mouth in a kiss to quell me. I’m gluttonous for him. I’m inspired. He pries us apart and grips my jaw in his hand, panting against my lips.

“We’re not fucking here,” he warns. He undoes his words when he sweeps his thumb across my bottom lip and tilts my face for another brief kiss. I'm a prickly bastard until I'm in his hands, made into a doughy pliant thing by his strength, his generosity.

I pout convincingly. “You’re no fun.”

“I have to clean up.”

“Stop being responsible.” I squeeze my thighs and rock my hips. It's more convincing than a pout 

“Hey - hey, fuck, _Baz_ , you’re the one who normally stops the bad behavior, yeah? Now it’s my turn.” He wiggles in my clutches. “Get yer spindly spider limbs off me, Shelob.”

I throw myself backwards dramatically, legs still wrapped around him, and stretch to a portrait of temptation, mundane in my wickedness. “Indulge me. You left me all alone this morning.”

He growls me into a shiver and roughly undoes the button of my jeans and unzip me. The sound of my fly rings all the slobbering bells in my head. My toes curl preemptively; my veins throb fatly. Arousal proofs to a foamy euphoria of anticipation; he makes and unmakes me too easily; I’m weak.

“I’m a lucky boy today,” I sigh, cock twitching to greet his mouth. He should know better than to reward my petulant bouts. He’s only reinforcing this kind of behavior; all future incidents shall thusly be blamed on his enabling. I’m innocent. I'm a product of my environment.

"Mmm. _Fu-ck_ _Simon_."

My eyes prick as he holds me down and licks the trembling skin of my belly, licks my pubic hair flat, licks my cock to eagerness. I stay pinned, deliciously resigned to him tugging at the strings of my nerves with each hungry suck of his mouth. It's brutal, the efficiency, the gut-clench pull of pleasure he wrings out of me. He digs his hands into my sides until I squeal and thrash and buck, until the root of me buries into the hot depth of his throat. I clutch at his hair and hang onto the frame of his shoulders and shudder us into a health and safety violation. It would be our luck if inspectors swept with blacklights.

He rises from my spent cock with tears and victory burning on his face, a challenge offered. All he does is curl his finger beneath my chin and I'm there, embracing his brand of disgusting as he spits the taste of me onto my tongue. I don’t have to be told twice to swallow. Simon Snow’s commands charm me past resistance or decency. He doesn't drunkenly rave what he wants to do to me; he acts. I swallow the crush of his lips and his tongue and revel in a freeness, a shamelessness shared between us.   
  
His lips are hot and succulent, his mouth turned into a creamy ruined thing from working my cock. Delicious. 

It hits me like a blow to the head, the clarity that he'd been giving me space last night. He knows me. He adores me. I need to stop holding myself in anticipation for him to do his worst. (All I needed was him to suck the nonsense out of me to think straight.)

“Give me a minute and I’ll help you clean up,” I promise after, sprawled on the table, deboned like one of his fucked and roasted chickens. He tucks me away with a fond pat: _goodnight little prince, sleep tight._

He thumbs at the corner of his puffy red mouth with a sly wink. “Lay there and look pretty, Baz.”

I fluff my hair and bare my neck and pull my shirt halfway up my belly so he has a little more to look at while I reclaim some of the laziness promised by a day off. I would offer to return the favor, but I can tell he’s a little distracted at the moment if he's walking away so easily. If I tried to suck him off it’d take hours to make him come and he'd probably have to finish with his hand after my jaw fell off my face. (That first time we got together and he popped like a champagne cork was not an accurate reflection. Past performance does not predict future result. 👌)

Later tonight, when I have him near a bed, I’ll remind him that he made me swallow my load and that I need his in order to form a complete protein chain or my delicate vegetarian constitution will wither.

(He likes to pretend that he’ll debunk my theories on nutrition but you know what they say; a blowjob a day keeps the doctor away.)

(I really should see Dr. Wellbelove again.)

“You’re really too good to me,” I tell him for the hundredth time, hoping he never really believes it. He’s a giver, and I’m insatiable.

He doesn’t say anything to that, only smiles with his teacup dimples and disposes of his baking crimes. I don’t know if I’m the worst or best person for him, he who feels like he has to work to be deserving of love. I want to shower him with it, soak him to his bones with love. I think he’ll let me. I look forward to the opportunity, assuming I don’t fuck it up. 

I peel off a layer of my defenses: I take him to Pitch and let him loose to investigate while I coax Goody Proctor into producing espresso.

“Shh, there there, girl, I know it’s your day off,” I soothe the beast of a machine. It shrieks. I coo. We have a tender relationship.

“Should I be jealous?” Snow asks, poking his head around the swinging door to observe the affair.

“The day you catch me buttchugging espresso, then we can talk.”

He wrinkles his nose, the fucking puritan. “Gross, Baz.”

“Take it up with Gwyneth.”

He huffs and rolls his eyes and generally judges me before disappearing back into the kitchen of Pitch. It’s his first time. I don’t mind him being distracted from me. I’ve never let him in Pitch’s kitchen before. But I’ll be fucked if I make macarons that aren’t on my prep sheet. Two birds and all that. (Two chickens...)

“Budge over.” I hipcheck him at the prep table. He pretends my sharp edges have sliced him apart. Drama queen. A second later he pastes himself against me. I elbow him. “Budge, Snow.”

“Christ your elbows.” He grabs up my prep sheet. “Is this for your next wedding?”

“Yes. Limoncello macarons and coconut key lime.”

“Citrusy.”

“Their colors are neon yellow and lime green.”

“Wow.” He whistles. “That's a decision.”

“I haven't decided if I love it or hate it. Here, I have recipes. I've done these flavors before.”

Limoncello ricotta with lemon curd, key lime italian buttercream rolled in toasted coconut. That was a summertime of mojitos and lemonade. Snow smacks his lips and ‘mmm’s noisily and together we up the mise en place of ingredients. He's lucky I keep lemon curd in abundant stock.

I pulse my almond flour with a critical eye and make him sift in the confectionery sugar three times. “I sift it again between each addition.”

“That's a lot of sifting.”

“Macarons are not forgiving.”

“No wonder you like them.”

It's true. That's why I like them. I like that he knows that. Finicky. Difficult. Sensitive little buggers. If I was a chicken who laid eggs, they'd be macarons. (I recognize that this thought doesn’t make sense but I’ve internalized that poor bird’s trauma from last night; I’ll be haunted by cutlets till I die.)

We crack eggs together. I’m momentarily paralyzed that I’ll crack one to reveal a half-formed chick but Snow suffers no such fear and blazes through the carton, heckling me for my slowness. Dickhead. I fuss him to separate them individually to guarantee he doesn’t ruin a batch of whites when he breaks the yolk on the edge of a shell; the yolks go to my crèmes and custards. I make a mental to to pick up more basil for the basil lime crème brûlée this week. Agatha can play with her torch all day.

I drag him to the commercial mixer as I give it a safety wipe down and show him how to finesse a meringue.

“You use a stopwatch?”

"Indeed." I set the first time for two minutes and fifty seconds. At the soft peak stage, I add the fine sugar. I gesture to the glossiness, the stiffening.

“No creme of tartar?”

“I'm not an amateur.”

“I suppose not.”

“You have to count.” I show him how to turn the spoon and incorporate the dry ingredients, scooping from the bottom and folding over in a complete gesture, smooth and continuous. “Don’t bludgeon it to death. See it turn in your hand?”

His arm flexes deliciously. I stand behind him unnecessarily and rest my chin on his head, turn his hand within my own. He sifts. We mix. “Ten strokes. You're big and strong. On the last, fifteen. See how stiff it is? Now this next step is all about the look and feel. Overmix and they'll fall flat. Under mix and they'll crack. Draw your eight. You want lava flow.”

“Now?”

“Not quite.”

“Now?”

“Two more turns. Press it against the bowl and release the air.”

“Now?” It ribbons, tearing delicately at the edges. I make sure he notices the soft folded shape of the batter settling.

“Yes. Good boy.”

“Careful, mate,” he threatens, all milkteeth.

I kiss the shell of his ear. He's harmless. I don't let him pipe, these are for a paying client after all. I fill tray after tray, twisting down my piping bag, focused and scarcely breathing. I love this part. The growing legion of little colorful bubbles. The uniform repetition. The easy pressure in my hands and microcosm of my control.

“That's just the lemon. While they dry, we'll mix the lime.” I flip on the low current fan to speed up the process. When I turn, he's already washing out the bowl, readying for round two. “What a good little assistant you are.”

“Is this what you fantasized about?” He sticks his butt out towards me and sways it with comedic enticement. I swat his cheeks.

“Not quite.”

He snorts disbelievingly. “Oi, I saw the evidence. You had naughty corporal punishment thoughts about me.”

“If I wanted to punish you, I'd make you zest for me.” I spank him again on principle, enough for him to hop off the ground. He's lucky I splurged on bulk lemon and lime zest. (Agatha put her foot down. Curse her.) It's good quality, just agonizingly expensive. He doesn't know pain until he's zesting four hundred lemons with raw fingers, freshly microplaned knuckles burning, staring down a prep sheet of hundreds of miniature lemon meringue tartlets.

He falls silent on his second attempt. I intervene during the whipping of the whites, his nerves wanting him to pull the meringue too early. I oversee his macaronage technique: tongue out, face scrunched in focus. He looks up to me proudly and shows off the bowl. He managed to stain his hand green with gel. I didn't even see him open it. I swear he's a toddler.

“You don't use the fancy dried makrut lime?” He tips his head towards my spice rack. He did a thorough job poking through my things. (This is what I meant about knowing my dry goods! It’s like he rifled through a drawer of my panties. Theoretically.)

“I'll make you a chili lime mango dessert sometime, then you can try it.”

“Oh, let's go to that place with the mango chow tonight. I am _not_ cooking for the next week, I swear. Don't let me even pretend. If I think of cooking, give me another spank, Baz.”

I arch my eyebrow at him. Yes, I'll certainly be returning the favor tonight; I think I've wound him up a wee bit. “If you insist.”

I categorically refuse to do more than order in during wedding season. July through October I'm out of commission on extra-curricular production. (He’s right. I would have bit his head off if he’d woken me up to do this. I'll sleep in tomorrow now.)

Even after making the lime macaron shells and washing up the station we’re left with over an hour to kill before I’ll bake them off. I can trust him to make the limoncello ricotta filling with little oversight. He turns on his music and wiggles happily as he mixes and steals tastes from the bowl. Considering where I know his mouth has so recently been, I should really throw something at him, but I don’t have the heart. (Sorry guests of the Ferrara wedding.) He’s at least using a different finger each time and not double-dipping; it’s borderline sanitary. He asks for so little. He should make more demands of me. (I should really give him a spoon. Or a tub of cheese.)

He passes me the filling for judgement; I offer him my hand to shake which earns me a beaming smile. Paul Hollywood whomst?

“Well, at least I know if my own place goes up in flames, I have a spot here, right?”

“I’d never hire you.”

He puffs out his cheeks. “I’m not that bad. I can work the till. Agatha has to go to school one day.”

I open and close my mouth a few times, feeling a chill in my fingertips that has nothing to do with the cold bowl I’m clutching. “I would never date an employee.”

“Not even a sexy one?” He’s trying to sneak a pinch of toasted coconut off the baking sheet I just slid onto the speedrack. I should let him burn his fingers.

“Simon," I say tersely.

He crams a cluster in his mouth and throws up his hands innocently. “Sorry - I didn’t eat breakfast and I’m getting hangry.”

“Eat one of Dev’s ugly croissants from the display. Come here.”

He shuffles his feet. “Eat a _kwuh-san,_ ” he overemphasizes my pronunciation, butchering the language in his already abrasive accent, “or come here?”

“Get a croissant from the case. Come here. Eat it while I talk to you. Do I need to write it down?"

He wipes his hands off with a suspicious air but obeys me, finding the ugliest one from the back of the row at the front counter. They’re on their last day tomorrow. “Do you want one?” he calls through the door.

My stomach loops through itself and ties a knot. “No.”

He brings me one anyway. I press my fingers through the crisp brown surface and into the bubbled pockets of flakey dough, tearing it apart layer by layer. None of it will make it to my lips. I don’t think he expected me to eat. He hops up onto the table and presses against me, eating in not-quite silence. He’s incapable of eating quietly, the animal. Crumbs stick to his thumb and he licks them. Crumbs fit beneath my nails and I loathe them.

“You should eat a little.” He nudges me with the side of his knee.

“Not now,” I murmur. I hand him the carcass of the croissant apologetically, failing that, and he devours it around a sigh.

I pick at my nails. “Thank you for helping me.”

“Thanks for showing me your secrets. I don’t think I can make them without you though, so don’t worry about me putting you out of business.” He gave me scones, I gave him macarons. It’s a love language.

“Thank you for...being you,” I say awkwardly, trying to get to my point.

He nudges me again, face soft. Expectant. Christ. I hate this. I wish I could just smack our skulls together and upload directly to him, skip all the tedious bits of communication. Distill myself straight to the source. I sneer and curse our lack of singularity.; his eyebrows go up. What happened to the good old days of leaving things poetically unsaid? Dr. Wellbelove doesn't know what he's talking about. The fucking quack. Agatha’s going to be a Shetland pony therapist and teach them how to whinny out “I feel” statements.

“Alright, love?”

“No.” I swallow and shake my head. “Well, yes. Alright. I am. Better.” Better than I was. Better than I’ve been. “I want to tell you something, but it’s horribly embarrassing.” I scoff bitterly to myself. “As if I can be more embarrassing than I was last night.”

“Shepard says it was only a nine out of ten on his, like, Yikes-a-mundo-scale.”

I frown. “He told me it was only an eight.”

“Awww, he was just being nice, Baz.” Snow kicks his feet in the air. “You can be more embarrassing, so have at it.”

“You're not inspiring a lot of confidence in me right now, Snow.”

He’s on me in a second, grunting into a hard kiss, holding me to him as he licks behind my teeth. “Baz.” He rolls his forehead against mine and stares me down with furious command. “Tell me.” He picks up my buttery-crumby hand and presses it to his cheek, holds it there so I can’t rattle apart. “I’ve got you.”

I bite his lip instead of my own and suck it sorry. He licks the tip of my nose and waits me out.

“The guy before you-”

“Wait- is story gonna make me want to kill him?-”

“-Yes, probably." Definitely. "Hush now.” He hushes.

“His name was Roland Lamb. Chef Lamb. He was the executive chef, a partial owner of Au-Delà, my boss and also my boyfriend.”

“Oh, fucking _woof_ , Baz.” That sums it up.

I nod, gusting out a breath. He kisses the peak of my cheekbone. “Was it really bad?” he asks quietly, turning to kiss the palm of my hand still on his cheek. I nod.

“You know the joke, about the GM fucking the hostess?”

“No,” he says. He’s not industry. It's not a funny joke.

“Well. The chef fucking the pastry boy is only one step up.”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty four.”

His voice is low when he asks, already guessing an answer: “How old was he?”

“Forty eight.”

He growls in his throat, feral and protective. It thrills me. It comforts me. It sets me on edge. I want to push him away; I want to tell him off for barbarism; I want to let him loose in revenge. I never want Lamb to so much as look at Simon Snow. 

“Yes it's all very cliche and stupid of me. At the time...when it started, I knew objectively that it was a bad idea. But I convinced myself that it wasn't. That I was past folly; that I was always right. Everyone else screwed up but not me.” I was adult enough to know how to handle it; so I thought.

_Chef Lamb hadn't been around the first few months I'd begun as a regular pastry assistant. Lucinda, the pastry chef, hired me. Our kitchen sat behind the main kitchen: quieter, cleaner, white coats compared to the smoke-stained blacks of the savory cooks._

_Our meeting had been unforgettable._

_It was Lamb’s first day returning from his restaurant in Las Vegas. I thought that's where chefs went to die, but it was where he went to rule his own kingdom. No partial ownership, no tense relation with Au-Delà’s “visionary” owner Braden._

_“You need to introduce yourself,” Lucinda told me in her bright French-Martinique accent, the voice of my daily keeper. “He doesn't care much about my team as long as they don't piss me off. He might like you. You want the chef to notice you.”_

_“I'm a hard man to like.”_

_She'd laughed in my face and shoved me out into the roiling kitchen; humid, salty, full of every language and every swear; a circle of sharks around the carnage of Roland Lamb’s return._

_He was firmly tearing someone’s shoddy knife work apart. I couldn't see, didn't want to step around the hulk of the saucier and his boiling pot. I listened to the swift execution._

_“Where is Miguel. Where is my Miguel?” (Everyone was his. I should have known it then.) “I have returned to a stranger fucking my fish. I can smoke rillettes from the meat you've left behind on the bone.”_

_“Chef. This is Benjamin. He worked for me-” the new sous interceded. The gossip was that while Lamb was overseas, Braden had packed the house with new hires. Their fights were legendary to my ears already. Everyone kept out of it. (You choose a side.) (You forget yourself.) (It will always be you for yourself.)_

_“Where is Miguel.” Not a question._

_“I fired him.”_

_“Pray tell?”_

_“He couldn't piss clear.”_

_“Do you piss clear? Hm? Are we taking piss tests now?”  
_

_(They tested you when they wanted you gone. Even then I wouldn’t have passed if they wanted me gone.)_

_“Braden-”_

_“I don't believe I'm interested in the end of that sentence. Both of you, out.”_

_“You can't fire me.” The sous was a proud man. He'd been running the ship in Lamb’s absence. A month. That was all. A month for him to forget his worth: a small sum._

_Lamb didn't raise his voice. He made the room strain to hear him. “Walk out of this kitchen if you ever want to work in France again.”_

_It's the kind of absurd thing I didn't think people said in real life. This had to be a joke. Even my father didn't pretend such dramatic threats. But both men obeyed. They hadn't been Lamb’s men. They'd been Braden’s. They didn't know that everyone was Lamb’s. You were either Lamb’s or you were out. You were either good or you weren't._

_The saucier moved. I stood tall and obvious in my whites, a pink streak of pomegranate syrup slashed across my apron like a mortal wound._

_Chef Lamb’s eyes fixed on me, blazing, eviscerating. Intrigued. “Now_ who _are you?”_

_I saw him, a formal introduction ready, my handshake half-gestured, and then I saw the vibrant gutted fish flayed open on the stainless steel table, its spine casually cast aside, a clear ninth pan of dark gelatinous organs stitched still to the body by a sticky strand of blood. I didn't think fish had blood._

_Lamb caught me from falling into a vat of veal stock when my legs forfeited their position of holding me upright._

_“Merde!” I made him raise his voice. It was a strange and brief victory. One I clung to in the years that passed. I remember his hands, softer than I would have thought for a chef. How young and fresh he looked._

_“Where did you come from,” he'd said wondrously, like I was a marvel and not a mess._

_He noticed me all right. He did nothing. I was a curiosity but I wasn't his. Not yet. I should have known. I shouldn't have wanted to be his. There’s no going back once you are._

“I made the excuse that it was a professional interest, when he paid attention to me or my work. And he was an Englishman, an ex-pat. It seemed significant. It helped me feel at home.” I hadn’t had anyone in those days; not even Fiona. She didn’t realize I needed her. I didn’t either.

_Lamb kept his distance, and I had no reason to seek him out. Months passed with no more than a few passing interactions. I hadn’t told him my name that day I fainted but he knew it. He called it to me a night I stayed late, fussing with my own private recipe with Lucinda’s permission. He’d waited until I was cleaning up, done, ready to leave; maybe it was kind, how he gave me an easy excuse that I didn’t think to take. (It wasn't a trap.)_

_I can still taste it. Tahini semifreddo, roasted plums with honey balsamic glaze, cracked cacao and chardonnay oak smoked sel gris. Layers of simplicity that punched with saltiness and succulence, that dissolved to cream and silk on the tongue with an indulgent bitter bite._

_“Are you running up my labor cost, Basilton?”_

_I can still see him, that night that never-ended. His hair pushed back from his face, his chef coat exchanged for a clean dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to reveal his expensive watch, the burn scars long faded and many up his arms. I have my own. We all do. They were the clearest sign of his experience, the thing that proved his time when his deceptive face hid the truth. The jump of grease, the unexpected hot lid, the moving parts you fail to dodge in a rush._

_“I’m off the clock, chef. Lucinda permits me to use the equipment in my free time.”_

_“She permits you.” He made it sound scandalous. Permits me. (How kept I sounded.) He considered the equipment I’d been using. “A stand mixer?”_

_“I don’t have the counter space at my flat.” I barely used my kitchen; I spent too many hours at Au-Delà. I was getting by on what I earned, what I’d been born with tucked away for security._

_“That doesn’t sound right.” I thought he meant me having a tiny squashed kitchen, but his mouth curled with his next words. “You should have asked me for permission, Basilton.”_

_I remember the terror, the uncertainty. I couldn’t read his face, tell if he was teasing or not. My pride warred with my respect. The pace of my heartbeat outraced my common sense._

_“If you’re here to scold me, chef, taste what I’ve made first.” I didn’t give him a choice, I didn’t wait. I deafened myself to his words or his laughter or the little voice inside my head warning me. He watched me plate the dish; the cold slice of nutty and pink semifreddo, the gem-bright plums, soaked and juicy, face up and drizzled with reduction, still gently warm from the oven; the black cacao, tinkling across the plate; the fat flakes of sel gris that made the mouth run with expectant saliva._

_I watched him smile at his first bite. I watched him scrape the dainty dessert fork through the melted mess and lick it clean. He ate tidily._

_“I think I’ll keep you, Basilton.”_

_“Baz.”_

_“Baz.” He stretched my name out, held the vowel in his throat; the z stung the air like a hornet. He said my name like he was really saying “mine.”_

“It was professional until it wasn’t. After that, well; I got in a little deep. With him. With the restaurant. The whole place, the industry. It’s not bad everywhere, but there was a lot of drug use with our crew. Lamb liked to indulge.” All it was was Lamb and work and a smudge of years.

“Sure,” Snow agrees passively. He’s as straightlaced as you can get when it comes to drugs. Whenever Fiona smells like weed he’s all agitated and pissy. He’s clean out of fear; he saw too many other kids like him lose what little they had to usage. I understand it. I don’t even smoke weed anymore thanks to his nerves. I’m smoking less cigarettes too. It’ll be a bitch to nip out for a fag in the middle of winter; he doesn’t let me smoke in his flat, not after he quit when he quit construction.

“The whole world narrowed to him. He was magnetic. He was everywhere. He was the first man I - loved. I loved him. And he gave me my chance. When Lucinda’s sous left us, he made sure it was me.”

You were good, or you weren’t. Or someone decided for you.

“You deserved it,” Snow insists, eager to validate me. “Baz, you’re amazing. That wasn’t Lamb.”

“It’s fine. I was happy.” Even if everyone knew we were fucking. Dating. Lovers. Whatever it was to them. They all knew I was Lamb’s. “Until I wasn’t. My dishes stopped belonging to me. A critique raved about one of my desserts, and my name never came out of anyone’s mouth. I’d been so mad and he’d just - made me feel selfish for wanting to be recognized. Foolish. I surrendered my IP to him again and again. He called it dedication, a good thing, how it was done. If I loved him, I would do it. There was a lot happening; him and the owner were always at it; sometimes my job felt precarious; Braden would want to oust all of Lamb’s loyal followers; or Lamb would threaten Braden that he’d take the whole team. He would tell me he was bringing me to Vegas, even though I hated the idea. That's not even including the percolating fear that he could fire me whenever he wanted. He made the decisions. He loved me conditionally for what I could be or how I could fit into his world. He wanted to push me to my breaking point; he'd say it was for my own good. I know now that he just wanted me broken.”

I don't know if he would have kept me like that or rebuilt me in his image.

I gasp in a breath, mouth dry from talking. I've said this before to Dr. Wellbelove, I had to. Fiona had seen right through the wreck of me.

_ What do I feed you tonight, Bazzy? Close your eyes, try this. One bite. Listen to me, one bite. What is it? Roasted beef marrow on toast point. Don't tell me it doesn't taste good. You need to be able to eat anything in this world. You can't get sick at a tasting. Here: I'll swaddle some salmon mousse in cucumber. Close your eyes and open your mouth if it's so bad. I'll sprinkle bulls blood micros on it for you. How about blood pudding next. You're so delicate. You need to live a little, Baz. I've got a big world to show you. _

Even now I believe Lamb loved me in his own way. I broke his heart. I should have broken more. I don't let myself think about him. I'll tell Snow all this now and he'll understand me a little more. We're past cardamom rosé.

“And then one night, I was drunk; I was at another restaurant late, past close. I was friends with the bartender there and I ran my mouth on him.”

“Baz,” Snow murmurs, shifting closer to me. He says nothing else, head ducked and peering at me, no, just a little to the side of me.

“To my friend, I thought. I thought it was safe to talk to someone else about what was happening; I had - I had no one." It took me years to realize I had no one but Lamb. "But that city, that world, it was Lamb’s first. They were his friend’s first and kept tabs on me. Lamb repeated every word I'd said against him that night.”

Snow asks the inevitable, the same thing Fiona asked: “did he hurt you?”

I snort and shake my head. This story exhausts me. “Not like that. It would have been easier if he had.” Or worse. Or so much worse. My head is cloudy enough without having taken any blows to it. “Instead I just… failed him. Disappointed him. Everything was my fault all the time. He told me he loved me and I was scorning him. He'd done so much for me-” I catch myself. “He _told_ me he'd done so much for me.” I shift under Snow’s touch. “It was bad. I couldn't leave. I was scared to leave him. I was scared _of_ him. And no one trusted me. No one talked to me or respected me. Then Braden published an Au-Delà book with my work and I lost it. Lamb hated him and still defended him. I just - I took my shit from the restaurant and ran. I ran away.”

Snow doesn’t let me sink into the memory. He's warm and steady.

“Is that what you’re embarrassed by?”

I look up from the blurry image of his mouth where I’d let my eyes slide out of focus. His jaw’s set and his eyes are flinty. “What?”

“You said you were embarrassed to talk to me about something. Are you embarrassed that this happened?”

“Ah.” I suck my teeth and prod my tongue at the sharp edge of my canine thoughtfully. “Yes. I hate myself for it." I groan slightly; I’d tensed up while talking and now my body aches with the strain of a full-body coil. “But that wasn’t to what I referred.”

“I’m glad.”

I raise a miserable eyebrow at him. “You’re glad?”

"Wait, no, not like that." He pulls a face and blusters. “Just that - I dunno. That that's not the embarassing thing? You having a shittastic abusive fucking ex isn’t embarrassing. It's just - I'm sorry that it happened. And it’s fucked you hate yourself. It’s fucked. I’m saying this as a man about to turn thirty-one, but twenty four is a baby. Baby Baz. So small.” He holds up his thumb and forefinger to demonstrate his point of his microscopically teeny I must have been. “Christ. Baby. _Baby_. If I’d have been there, I would have beat the fuck out of this guy. The fuck. I wish I’d been there, the fuck.”

Leave it to Simon Snow to hit the nail on the head without even trying.

I smile, split between actual amusement and bitterness. “That’s it.”

He’s turned his demonstration of how teensy I’d theoretically been at twenty-four into pinching and plucking at me like some crustacean lover eating sea lice off me or whatever the fuck he thinks crabs eat. (I don’t know what they eat. Sea lice seems reasonable.)

“What’s it?” he asks, clearly distracted. I think this is him attempting to cheer me up. It’s working. He has no idea how to handle trauma; it’s fine; I handled it already. It's just exhausting to carry. This is an unburdening. 

“That. You. That’s the embarrassing thing.”

He shakes his head in a slow decline of comprehension. I grab his pinchy-claws and grumble into his knuckles, forced to further regurgitate the dark trappings of my mind. “I would watch you on Bake Off and fantasize about falling in love with you instead of Lamb.”

“Oh.” Huge blue eyes, round pink mouth. Face full of freckles burning up in his blush. He’s blazing under me; I can’t help but carry on in embarrassing myself (and him.)

“You would be the handsome baker and you’d have been protective of me and defeat Lamb in mortal combat."

“Like the video game?”

“Jesus fucking christ, Simon. _No_. In a duel for my honor or heart or something. It'd be very heroic. Then we'd fuck spectacularly.”

“Mortal Kombat is a video game, you nut.”

“God! Fine! Then beat him at a damn game you imbecile!"

He laughs helplessly, hysterically. “Fuck me, Baz. Now I really wish I’d been there to beat the shit out of that guy. What the fuck was I doing five years ago; sleeping on Ebb’s sofa and working like a dog, finishing fights in trash shit Liverpool pubs.”

Those urchins don’t know how lucky they are to have seen Snow in a fight. I’d pay good money; I’d probably tear off my trousers if I saw him swing one of his huge fists. I certainly envisioned his sweet nature turning wild and ruthless in my defense as often as I pretended that I'd keep him on his knees. I don't have to keep him anywhere. He bends to me eagerly. I have to work hard to get lower than him some nights.

“And I was being formatively traumatized. Again. Aren't we star crossed and destined, hmm?"

He grins his no-good grin. It’s sorry and crooked and worn out from a hard life lived young. Sometimes he’s such an old man. Sometimes he’s an imaginary boy who lives in my head. “We could form a club. Like a trauma boy-band.”

“You’re deranged.”

His nose wrinkles up. “Says you.”

“Says me,” I nod solemnly. “That’s a very good point.” Pot, kettle.

“Baz?” He's serious again. I'd rather have him pretending to be Sebastian from the Little Mermaid than be serious about this. “You didn't deserve any of that. I wish I’d been there. I'd have been there if I'd known.”

He's completely serious and the most ridiculous man I've ever met. He would bend space and time for me if he could. He's the nightmare of my wildest dreams. _“Please_ don’t internalize this.”

“Yeah, well, just watch me. I'm so gonna.”

“Should I not have told you? Don't make this a thing. Pretend I didn't tell you.”

He shakes his head urgently, pinching me with his crabby-claws once more, trying to tickle me. He’s so annoying. I’m laughing as he pinches my sides. It feels so good to laugh; he gets brighter as I do; it's good to make him bright. “I’m glad you told me. I’m really - I’m really glad.” He settles his fingers around my ribs, slotting with the breathing bones of me. “I figured it was probably something like that-”

“-am I that obvious?”

“Baz. I’ve seen some shit.” His mouth flattens. “You know I’ve seen some shit.”

He talks around his life like he’s dodging landmines and potholes, a game of mental hoops and hopskotch. Half of him is waved away gestures and long silences. Sometimes I don’t think he existed until I saw him on the telly. Sometimes, I think he believes that too. I love him. I’m learning more of him everyday. I love him; I’ll show him more of me everyday.

"I know."

"I'm going to keep trying to be the best man I can be for you. I know you...might still worry-"

"-it's not fair to keep his ghost between us-"

"Fair's got nothing to do with anything. Besides, you deserve someone to try for you. We all do."

Him and these goddamn _sentences_ he keeps forming. Maybe the universe wants Simon Snow to speak after all.

“Did I really help you?” he asks softly, rubbing my stomach over my shirt, petting the last trembles of my laughter fluttering through me. “When I wasn’t fucking up on Bake-Off. Did I help you, uhm, like, process stuff? With your weird objectifying power fantasies or whatever?”

"I think I projected my own self-objectification on you, but yes. You did. You were incredibly wholesome and unbelievably sexy.” A hopeless crush; he gave me something to claim. He let me pretend my way out of the dark of my spiral. He helped me rescue myself in my imagination over and over again. Sometimes all we need is a beacon in the dark to keep us going, real or imagined. We need heroes for when we can't yet save ourselves. “Yelling at your shit piping skills was also cathartic.”

He huffs a relieved laugh. “Sorry it took so long for me to come into your life properly.”

“Are you really apologizing for that?”

He shrugs. Yup. He’s going to flagellate over this.

“Simon. Love. I still think I’m dreaming you up in my head most days.”

He kisses me. I expect nothing less. Slow, tender, bottomless with his affection and painfully gentle. I suck in a needy breath and press closer to him, kissing his cheek and his ear and the bolt of his jaw until I can rest my face in the curve of his shoulder. I debate with myself for a few beats of his heart; I can feel the artery in his neck lubbing evenly into my ear.

He hums a wisp of a song and turns us in a circle once more. _Stars shining high above you..._ Slow dance me into the grave, why don't you, Simon.

“This may or may not be my window of opportunity to tell you that I love you,” I whisper into the chords of music and the rumbling thrum of his vocals.

I don't have to look; I can hear his smile when he speaks. “Pretty good window, yeah? I was thinking the same thing.”

I pinch his side gently so he doesn't try to beat me to this. “I love you, Simon. I’m completely gone for you. In love and ridiculous about it.”

His voice sticks wetly in my hair when he murmurs it back, kissing my temple before and after the words. “I love you too, Baz. I love you. Might be a couple years late to it but-”

“No. No. You’re perfectly on time. You’re perfect to me, Simon.” Simon promised me he wouldn't be that guy, that everyday he'd prove again that he wasn't Lamb. He hasn't let me down. And I'll make sure all of his hard work pays off in the end.

“Aw, you’re just buttering me up to help you finish those macarons.” His ability to maintain the moment ran out fast. That's alright; we got the most important things covered. The past the present the hopeful future.

(He loves me he loves me of course he does he likes hard work.)

I squirm around until he lets me lean over his shoulder enough to see the trays on the speedrack. They look matte. “You don’t have to stay here.”

“I know you know I’m not leaving this half-done. Not my style.”

“I do know.” He's incapable of giving up, and I'm a lucky lucky man for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the trigger warning note: baz was 24 when he entered a relationship with his boss lamb who was 48. lamb more or less isolated baz and manipulated him, primarily through the power dynamic of their work relationship. there is also a bit of dialogue where lamb would have baz eat meat suggesting that baz should be able to eat without getting sick as part of working in the restaurant industry. baz admits to being scared of Lamb and feeling insecure about his own autonomy. this translates to his intellectual property also being taken away from him. he frequents refers to it as belonging to Lamb. simon directly asks baz if lamb ever hit him; baz says no but he thinks it would have been easier if lamb had (ie: easier to have left him if he felt like he had something concrete to justify it.) anyway, lots of power imbalance and psycho/emotional manipulation. 
> 
> and like, simon isn't perfect so his response to trauma isnt going to be textbook either. sometimes it just be like that.


End file.
